Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘ Carajo, ’ Lydia curses, automatically pushing Luca behind her.

‘What, Mami?’

‘Stay here. No, go stand over there.’ She points back in the direction from which they came, and for once, Luca doesn’t argue. He scuttles up the street, a dozen paces or more. Lydia drops the overnight bag at her feet on the sidewalk, takes a step back from the car, looks up and down the street. Her heart doesn’t race; it feels leaden within her.

Her husband’s parking permit is glued to the windshield, and there’s a smattering of rust across the back bumper. She steps into the street, leans over to see if she can read the paper without lifting it. A news van is parked just beyond the yellow crime scene tape at the far end of the block, but its reporter and cameraman are busy with preparations and haven’t noticed them. She turns her back and tugs the slip of paper free from the wiper. One word in green marker: boo! Her quick intake of breath feels like a slice through the core of her body. She looks back at Luca, crumbles the paper in her fist, and jams it into her pocket.

They have to disappear. They have to get away from Acapulco, so far away that Javier Crespo Fuentes will never be able to find them. They cannot drive the car.

Lydia circles the orange Beetle twice, glancing through the windows, inspecting the tires, the gas tank, what she can see of the undercarriage by stooping down without touching anything. Nothing appears different from how they left it, not that she was paying much attention. She stands back and crosses her arms over her chest. She won’t dare to drive it, but she must at least open it, to retrieve some of their belongings from inside. That need feels urgent, but her mind cannot reach beyond the immediate present, so she doesn’t get as far as the word keepsakes .

She peers through the window and sees Sebastián’s backpack on the passenger-side floor, her own sunglasses glinting on the dashboard, Luca’s yellow-and-blue sweatshirt sprawled on the backseat. It’s too dangerous to go home now, to the place where they all live together. She needs to be quick, to get Luca out of here. For a brief moment, Lydia considers that if there’s a bomb in the car, it might be kinder to take Luca with her, to call him over here now before she opens the door, but her maternal instinct defeats this macabre idea.

So she approaches with the key shaking in her hand, using the other hand to steady it. She looks at Luca, who gives her a thumbs-up. There won’t be a bomb, she tells herself. A bomb would be overkill after all those bullets. She pushes the key into the lock. One deep breath. Two. She turns the key. Thunk. The sound of the door unlocking is almost enough to finish her. But then silence. No ticking, no beeping, no whoosh of murderous air. She closes her eyes, pivots, returns Luca’s thumbs-up. She swings the creaky door open and begins rummaging inside. What does she need? She stops short, her confusion momentarily paralyzing. This cannot be real, she thinks. Her mind feels stretched and warped. Lydia remembers her mother walking in circles for weeks after her papi died, from sink to fridge, sink to fridge. She’d stand with her hand on the tap and forget to turn it on. Lydia can’t do a suspended loop like that; there is danger. They have to move.

Sebastián’s backpack is here. She must pick it up. She needs to accomplish the tasks immediately before her. There will be time later to begin the work of comprehending how this could have happened, why it happened. She opens her husband’s backpack, takes out a sloshing thermos, his glasses, the keys to his office, his headphones, three small notebooks and a fistful of cheap pens, a handheld tape recorder, and his press credentials, and places everything on the passenger seat. Her husband’s Samsung Galaxy Tab and charger she keeps, though she powers the tablet all the way down before returning it into the now-empty backpack. She doesn’t understand how GPS works in these devices, but she doesn’t want to be trackable. She retrieves her sunglasses from the dashboard and shoves them onto her face, almost stabbing herself in the eye with one outstretched stem. She pushes the seat forward to see what’s in back. Luca’s church shoes are on the floor, where he left them when he changed into his sneakers to play fútbol with Adrián. Oh my God, Adrián, Lydia thinks, and the cleft feeling in her chest opens deeper, as if there’s an ax hacked into her sternum. She squeezes her eyes closed for just a moment and forces a cycle of breath through her body. She lifts Luca’s shoes and places them into the backpack. Sebastián’s red New York Yankees hat is on the backseat, too. She grabs it, climbs out of the car, and tosses it to Luca, who puts it on. In the trunk, she finds Sebastián’s good brown cardigan, which she shoves into the bag. There’s also a basketball (which she leaves) and a dirty T-shirt, which she keeps. She slams the trunk, walks back to the front seat to select one of his notebooks, not yet allowing herself to consider the reason she does this – to retain a personal record of his extinct handwriting. She chooses one at random, places it in the backpack, and then locks the doors behind her.

Luca comes to stand beside her before she beckons him. My son is fundamentally altered, she thinks. The way he watches her and interprets her wishes without command.

‘Where will we go, Mami?’

Lydia gives him a sideways glance. Eight years old. She must reach past this obliteration and find the strength to salvage what she can. She kisses the top of his head and they begin to walk, away from the reporters, away from the orange car, Abuela’s house, their annihilated life.

‘I don’t know, mijo, ’ she says. ‘We’ll see. We’ll have an adventure.’

‘Like in the movies?’

‘Yes, mijo. Just like in the movies.’

She slings the backpack onto both shoulders and tightens the straps before hoisting the overnight bag, too. They walk several blocks north, then hang a left toward the beach, then turn south again, because Lydia can’t decide if they should be somewhere crowded with tourists or if they should try to stay out of sight altogether. She frequently looks over her shoulder, studies the drivers of the passing cars, tightens her grip on Luca’s hand. At an open gate, a mutt barks at them, lunging and nipping. A woman in a drab floral dress comes out of the house to correct the dog, but before she can get there, Lydia kicks it savagely and feels no guilt for having done so. The woman yells after her but Lydia keeps moving, holding Luca by the hand.

Luca adjusts the brim of his father’s too-big Yankees hat. Papi’s sweat is seeped into the hatband, so little currents of his scent puff out whenever Luca pulls it to one side or the other, which Luca does now at regular intervals so he can smell his father. Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it. At length, they spot a bus and decide to get on.

It’s midafternoon on a Saturday, and the bus isn’t crowded. Luca feels glad to sit, until he realizes that the movement of his legs beneath him, carrying the weight of his small frame through the streets of his city, had been the thing staving off the crush of horror that now threatens to descend. As soon as he’s seated beside Mami on the blue plastic seat, his tired legs dangling down, he begins to think. He begins to shake. Mami puts her arm around him and squeezes tight.

‘You cannot cry here, mijito, ’ Mami says. ‘Not yet.’

Luca nods, and just like that, he stops trembling and the risk of tears evaporates. He leans his head against the warm glass of the bus window and looks out. He focuses on the cartoon colors of his city, the green of the palm fronds, the trunks of the trees painted white to discourage beetles, the vivid blare of signs advertising shops and hotels and shoes. At El Rollo, Luca looks at the children and teenagers in line for the ticket window. They wear flip-flops and have towels around their necks. Behind them, the red and yellow water slides swoop and soar. Luca puts one finger against the glass and squashes the children in line one by one. The bus squeaks its brakes at the curb, and three damp-haired teenage boys get on. They pass Luca and Lydia without a glance and sit in the back of the bus, elbows planted on knees, talking quietly across the aisle.